


he's good and he's bad and he's all that i've got

by hi_raeth



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Reylo AU Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-30 07:42:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15747312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hi_raeth/pseuds/hi_raeth
Summary: When Rey moves to the big city for a fresh start, it seems like life is finally going her way: she has a job that pays the bills, she’s sharing a house with her favorite people, and for the first time ever, she’s living in the same city as her best friend.But Rey’s life in Coruscant is about to get a lot more complicated once she finds out that her best friend Ben Solo is also the infamous Kylo Ren, the bane of her friends’ lives.





	he's good and he's bad and he's all that i've got

**Author's Note:**

> For Reylo AU Week, **Day 1 - Modern AU.**
> 
> Title from The Civil Wars' _Devil's Backbone._

“Look at that smile!”

Rey looks up from her phone to find Finn and Poe making their way to her table, the latter flashing her a toothy grin. “Funny meme or secret boyfriend?” Poe asks with an over-the-top waggle of his eyebrows as he slides into the booth.

“Probably just Ben,” Finn tells him distractedly, scanning the crowded bar for the fourth member of their party.

Poe’s forehead scrunches up the slightest bit in question; he’s got a ridiculously expressive face, a fact Finn had dreamily related to Rey at least twenty times before he finally picked up the courage to approach his crush. “Who’s Ben?”

“Rose is at the bar, by the way–”

“Her best friend,” Finn explains just as Rey speaks, and he gives Poe’s forearm a light squeeze before disappearing into the crowd to navigate his way to Rose and the bar.

It’s only been two months since Finn shyly introduced Poe to their tiny friend group, but the man has a way of putting you at ease. There’s no awkward pause when they realize they’ve been temporarily left together, two half-strangers who’ve only just begun to form a tentative friendship. “I thought Finn’s your best friend,” Poe comments as Rey’s phone buzzes with an incoming text. “Or Rose. Or both.”

“They _are_ ,” Rey insists, “but… you’re allowed to have more than one best friend. Especially when they’re from different chapters of your life.”

“Fair enough,” Poe shrugs, and he twists around in the booth and cranes his neck to try and catch a glimpse of their friends while Rey picks up her phone.

 _I’ll try my best_ , Ben has written in reply to her invitation for him to come hang out with her and meet her friends. Rey frowns and shoots back a reply just as Finn and Rose return to the table with a round of drinks.

_Ben, come on. It’s been a week since I moved here and we still haven’t gotten to hang out._

She adds a second text for good measure as Rose slides a glass her way. _Please?_

“So how come I’ve never heard of this mysterious Ben?” Poe asks his boyfriend as Finn slides in next to him.

Rose lets out a little snort as she settles in beside Rey. “ _Mysterious_ is the right word for it,” she tells Poe. “Even _we_ ’ve never met the guy.”

Poe looks appropriately incredulous, which clearly pleases Finn and Rose. “But they’re your best friends!” he sputters at Rey, who’s reaching for her buzzing phone once more.

_I’ll definitely be late, and I won’t be able to stay long._

Rey smiles as Ben starts typing again, and seconds later another message pops up: _But I promise to make it, okay?_

“About that,” she looks up to find the other three watching her with knowing smiles, the kind Finn and Rose always give her when she insists that she and Ben aren’t _like that_. “How would you guys feel about meeting Ben?”

“Finally!” Rose cries, giving Rey a playful shove. “When? Where?”

“Um,” Rey hesitates, sends Ben a string of celebratory smileys and hearts before she sets her phone aside for good. “Tonight, actually. Here. If that’s okay with you guys?”

“Peanut,” Finn shakes his head at her as he slings an arm around Poe’s shoulder. “We’ve been waiting to meet the guy for four years now. _Of course_ it’s okay.”

Rey smiles, finally relaxes enough to reach for her drink. “He’s working late, but he promised to drop by. It’ll be great,” she tells the others. “I’ll finally have all of my favorite people in the same place.”

“Aww,” Rose rests her head on Rey’s shoulder with a grin. “You’re our favorite too, desert girl.”

They lapse into a warm, happy silence for a bit, each nursing their drinks and taking a moment to unwind after a long day. And when that’s done, Poe leans forward eagerly and sets his empty glass down.

“So, how’d you two meet?”

 

* * *

_By the time Rey is fourteen, she’s well aware of the fact that she’s the best mechanic in town, far better than Unkar Plutt could ever hope to be._

_But she’s also known since the age of nine that Plutt giving customers the wrong – and often pricier – verdict has nothing to do with his skills, and since she needs him to stay in business so that she doesn’t lose her job, Rey dutifully plays along with her boss’ scams and pretends not to know any better. It works because most of the people who stop by the garage are often from out of town, city people who’ll pay anything to get out of this desert and back to the main roads as soon as possible._

_The boy who drives a classic Ford Falcon into the garage one day is not one of those people._

_He’s rattling off a list of parts and repairs before Plutt can so much as pop the hood, and when her boss tries to pull his usual scam the stranger rolls his eyes and crosses his arms. Plutt’s a short man – shorter than even her now, since she hit her first growth spurt a few months back – but next to the ridiculously tall boy his tiny, squat form is more comical than ever. Rey chokes down a laugh, rubs at her nose when a snort escapes anyway and pretends it was a sneeze._

_Plutt falls for it. The boy does not, and his eyes linger on her for a beat before he returns his attention to the situation at hand. Rey wisely keeps her eyes averted and her back turned as the men start raising their voices, and she pretends to be busy wiping grease off her tools when the boy hops into the car and slams the door shut._

_The engine sputters to life, just barely, and there’s a concerning crackle that accompanies him as he drives the car away._

_“Thinks he’s so smart,” Plutt mutters under his breath as he stomps back into his office. He only ever comes out long enough to deliver his bullshit verdict before delegating all the work to Rey these days. She’s not complaining; the less time she has to spend with her asshole boss, the better. “You’ll see, he’ll be back before the end of the day, begging me for help.”_

_The boy does not return, and her boss is still grumbling to himself as they lock up the shop and go their separate ways, Plutt to his apartment above the garage and Rey to the rotting tool shed she was lucky enough to find two years ago._

_Plutt finally stops bitching about it three days later. He never finds out that the reason the stranger didn’t return was because Rey ended up helping the boy – Ben – fix his car for a much more reasonable price._

_“My dad would kill me if he found out I let some random kid mess around with his precious car,” Ben tells her with a laugh as she’s bent over the engine, and there’s no mistaking the satisfaction in his voice at the thought._

_“Hey,” Rey straightens up just long enough to shoot him a glare. “I’m not just some random kid. No one in this desert knows cars better than I do.”_

_“If you say so, scavenger,” he shrugs, eyeing the little trash heap of parts they salvaged from the local junkyard._

_The nickname sticks._

_It’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship._

* * *

It’s been forty-five minutes since Ben texted to let her know he’s on his way, and Rey can’t stop checking her phone.

“Any update since you last checked your phone _thirty seconds ago_?” Finn asks pointedly as he and Poe return with another round of drinks and some questionable bar food.

“It’s been _at least_ two minutes,” Rey huffs in protest as Finn pushes a small dish of peanuts towards her. She’s just about to reach out for some when her phone _finally_ lights up.

_Just parked down the street, be there in a few._

“He’s here!” she declares, and Rose lets out a startled little cry when Rey pushes at her and asks to be let out of the booth. She’ll know when he walks in – she always does, somehow – but Rey turns towards the door anyway and cranes her neck to catch a glimpse of Ben.

“I’m honestly still shocked that he’s _real_ ,” Finn stage-whispers to Rose, but Rey is too distracted to snap at them for the joke. Because the door has just opened, and in walks the best friend she hasn’t seen in six months.

Their eyes meet, and her feet begin moving of their own accord, drawn to Ben as always. “Look at her go!” she faintly hears Poe cheer as she speeds up into a run, but nothing else matters as she jumps into Ben’s arms and he picks her up in one smooth, practiced move, the momentum of her barely even jostling him.

Ben is warm and safe and still smells like the first real home she ever knew, and Rey immediately tucks her head under his chin and closes her eyes.

“Hello, scavenger,” he chuckles quietly, warm lips brushing against her temple. “Missed me?”

“Always,” Rey breathes against the bare skin of his neck before she pulls back to get a good look at him. “Hi, stranger. Fancy seeing you here,” she quips, her voice shakier than it should be.

Ben just laughs and shakes his head at her, leans down to bury his face in her hair for a moment before he sets her down. “It’s good to see you, sweetheart.”

“I’m glad you came,” Rey tells him as his hands begin to slide off her waist, and she catches one with her own before he can break contact with her entirely. “Come meet my friends,” she says gently, and when Ben simply nods in agreement she uses their linked hands to pull him towards the table.

When Rey catches sight of her friends’ wide-eyed looks, her first thought is to write it off as a typical reaction to Ben. He’s ridiculously tall and broad and is probably nowhere near what they’d expected the dork from her stories to look like, after all. But something begins to gnaw at Rey’s stomach as they move closer, and her intuition proves right when Ben tenses just as Finn and Rose shoot him a glare.

“What’s wrong?” Rey asks, turning back to look at Ben. He’s dropped his eyes to the floor the way she hasn’t seen him done since he was an awkward teenager running away from home all those years ago. She gives his hand a squeeze, prompting Ben to tear his gaze away from his shoes.

“I… I think it was a bad idea for me to come here,” he tells her quietly, his shoulders slumped in defeat.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Rey frowns, curving her free hand around his cheek. “You’re my best friend. _I_ want you here,” she insists as Ben leans into her touch. “Now tell me what’s wrong.”

He sighs heavily, runs a hand down his face. “It’s work,” Ben mutters vaguely. “It’s always fucking _work_ ,” he snaps bitterly.

Rey knows he hates his job, knows he’s regretted accepting that bonded scholarship ever since he started working for First Order, but she can’t figure out what exactly that has to do with her friends glaring at the man they were so excited to meet just minutes ago until–

She turns to Finn, who’s now got his arms crossed. Finn who went to college on the same bonded scholarship, Finn who’s told her multiple times that he’s never even heard of a Ben Solo at work.

“Do you two know each other?”

Finn turns to Rose, and they trade an indecipherable look while Rey tightens her grip on Ben, prompted in equal parts by the instinct to defend him from her friends and the need to keep him from running away.

Finally, Rose speaks. Her voice is gentle but everything else about her screams confusion, as if she can’t fathom having to explain this.

“Rey… that’s Kylo Ren.”

Kylo Ren is the man who’s made Finn’s life a living hell for the last two years. Kylo Ren is the man who’s been hounding Rose to sell her start-up for the past four months. Kylo Ren, as far as her friends are concerned, is a _monster_.

Rey would know; after all, she’s spent enough time on the phone listening to them rant and helping them trash-talk a total stranger to make them feel better.

Now she turns to Ben, the man she’s known for what sometimes feels like her whole life, and the look on his face as he avoids her eyes makes Rey’s heart heavy with dread.

Kylo Ren, her best friend.

 

* * *

 

_Ben doesn’t stick around in Jakku for long – no one ever does._

_But the night before he leaves on his big ‘last summer of freedom’ road trip, when they’re both leaning against the hood of his fixed Falcon and admiring the stars she’s spent all her life memorizing, he asks her to come with him._

_“You’re_ fourteen _, Rey. You’re supposed to be in school, worrying about essays and boys and shit. No kid should live like this,” he says gently, holding out a hand to her like she’s a wild animal who might spook and run at the slightest hint of concern, of another human giving a shit about her._

_He’s not entirely wrong._

_“I’m not a kid,” Rey protests weakly, crosses her arms and turns away from his big, earnest eyes. “I’ll be fifteen this year… I think. Plutt says he’s not sure when I was born, but he lies about everything. I’m pretty sure my parents gave him my birth certificate.”_ When they sold me to him _, she leaves unsaid. It doesn’t matter that Ben is the only friend she’s ever had, that he makes her feel safer and more comfortable than she ever has. There are some things you don’t tell a boy you’ve known for all of one week, even if said boy might be the only person in the world who cares about you._

_“Rey, please,” Ben whispers, tugs at her hand to pull her attention back to him. “Come with me. We’ll drive around the country, see a bunch of stupid things and eat a ton of stupid food, and then when summer ends you can come to Coruscant with me and we’ll both start a new life. Leave the past behind, let it die.”_

_She wants to go with him. God, how she wants to._

_“I can’t,” Rey says quietly, squeezes Ben’s hand and offers him an apologetic smile. “I need-” to wait for her parents, to hang on to a promise they broke years ago, to hold out hope for the reunion she knows she’ll never get. “I’m not ready,” she tells him instead._

_Ben sighs and pulls her to his chest; his is the only warmth that’s ever felt welcoming to her in this forsaken desert. “Okay,” he murmurs, stroking her hair. “Okay, next time then. I’ll get my life in Coruscant all set up, and then I’ll come back for you, okay?_

_Rey huffs against his chest, and Ben draws back to look at her with furrowed brows. “What is it?”_

_She shrugs. “That’s nice of you to offer and all, but don’t worry, Ben. No one ever comes back. I’m used to it.”_

_He frowns at her and curls his fingers around her shoulders with a gentle but insistent pressure. “I mean it, Rey. I’ll come back for you, before summer ends. And if you’re still not ready, then I’ll come back for you during winter break. And spring break. And next summer. I’ll keep coming back until you’re ready to leave with me.”_

_Hardened child of the desert that she is, Rey scoffs and shrugs his hands off. “For what, Ben? I’m just some random desert rat who helped you fix up your car. Why do you even care?”_

_His frown smooths away to reveal a blank look of confusion, and for one horrible moment Rey thinks she’s made the biggest mistake of her life, scared off a perfectly good thing the way the harsh sun of Jakku runs everything good and pure out of this town._

_“I don’t know,” Ben admits easily, “but I do. Okay?”_

_Rey decides to play along because that’s easier than trying to tell Ben that she feels it too, this inexplicable connection they share. “Okay,” she says, and allows herself to rest her head against his heart when he hugs her again._

_She closes her eyes and memorizes every single detail of this wonderful moment, of this_ one _moment in her life when it feels like someone actually cares for her. Ben promises, again, to come back for her, but Rey knows better than to let herself believe that._

_He leaves the next morning, early enough for her to say goodbye before she’s due at the garage._

_And then, miracle of all miracles, he comes back six weeks later._

* * *

They don’t talk about that night, ever.

So Rey tiptoes around it, the white elephant her friends seem intent on ignoring, and for a while everything seems to work out just fine. Her friends don’t talk about Kylo Ren, she doesn’t say anything when she leaves to hang out with Ben, and peace reigns at the Niima-Storm-Tico house.

Until the day she comes down the stairs looking particularly dressed up – Ben has tickets to the opera, and she’s never been – and Rose immediately abandons the TV to interrogate her.

“Ooh, looks like someone has a hot date,” she says teasingly, leaving the comfort of their couch to lean against the wall and watch Rey strap on a pair of reasonable heels. She’s not short by any stretch of the imagination, but it’ll be nice not to crane her neck all the way up to talk to Ben for once.

“Just going out with a friend,” Rey mumbles, grabbing her coat off the row of hooks behind their front door.

“A friend, huh?” Rose crosses her arms skeptically. “You never get this dressed up to go out with us. Right, Finn?”

Finn wanders out of the kitchen with a bowl of chips in hand, clearly planning to bring them back up to his room. He takes one look at Rey and scowls. “You’re going out with _him_ , aren’t you?”

Rose turns back to her. “Him?” she echoes questioningly. “Who’s-”

“Who else?” Finn huffs, changes course and chooses to throw himself down on the couch instead where he can pin her with his best Disappointed Dad look, the one with a touch of angry disapproval.

“Oh,” Rose says softly as it clicks in her mind. “Kylo Ren? Seriously, Rey? Why are you still–”

“Can we not do this right now?” Rey pleads with a sigh, bending down to grab her clutch off the floor. “I love you guys, and I know there’s been some sort of huge misunderstanding here, but he’s my oldest friend–”

“Some sort of misunderstanding?” Finn echoes in disbelief as he joins Rose, the two of them regarding her with matching crossed arms and tense looks. “The man refers to me _by my employee ID_ to belittle me and has been sending assholes to scare Rose into selling her company. What the fuck kind of misunderstanding is that, Rey? The kind where _you_ misunderstand the fact that he’s a total and complete fucking monster?”

Rey shakes her head. “Finn, you don’t understand, there’s more to the story–”

“Are you seriously defending him right now?” Rose demands incredulously. “This is the man who’s _still_ being an asshole to us, even now that he knows we’re your friends. He sent lawyers to my office _yesterday,_ Rey. How can you defend that? How can you side with him over us?”

“He’s my–”

“Best friend,” Finn mutters darkly. “Yeah, we know. And I guess we’re just two random people you live with.”

“No, guys, that’s not–”

Her phone buzzes, the vibrations painfully loud over the thin layer of fabric she calls a bag. Rey doesn’t need to check the message to know who it’s from, and neither do the others.

“Just go to him,” Rose mutters, her glare boring a hole into the spot of wall just beyond Rey’s shoulder. “If he’s that important to you, just fucking go to him.”

Her eyes flit from Rose to Finn, both of them hurting in different ways, both of them completely unwilling to let go of that hurt long enough to just hear her out. Rey exhales heavily and turns her back on them.

“Maybe I should move out,” she whispers as her hand curls around the doorknob, and she shuts the door behind her before she can hear them react – or worse, agree.

 

* * *

_True to his word, Ben comes back to Jakku every chance he gets._

_After that first summer, the one where she turned his offer down twice, he begins to focus on making her life better rather than uprooting it entirely. When he comes back during winter break, he rents a tiny motel room and convinces her to stay there after he has to go back to college, saying he’s overpaid for it so she might as well stay there and get his money’s worth._

_It takes her four days to find out that he’s ‘overpaid’ by a full six months, with every intention of extending the unconventional lease the next time he comes back to visit._

_They fight about it when he returns during spring break, but he quickly shuts her up by saying she’s the only friend and the closest thing to family that he has left, and it’s only natural to look out for her. He brings an old laptop along, one of the few things he took with him when he ran away from home after high school, and tells Rey it’s all hers now that he’s got a brand new one courtesy of his scholarship._

_Together they sign her up for online GED prep classes, and for the first time ever Rey’s future starts to diverge from the vision of endless sand and sun she’d resigned herself to as a child._

_“I don’t like this,” Rey declares when Ben returns in the summer to kidnap her for a road trip, the two of them inspecting the inside of his car’s hood before they entrust their lives to this patched-together piece of ancient machinery._

_“Cars?” he asks with a cheeky little grin, a rare sight on him. “I thought you love them.”_

_“You know what I mean,” she huffs, rolls her eyes and crosses her arms. “You keep doing all of these nice things for me and I appreciate it, really I do, but I’m not_ used _to nice, Ben. It makes my skin feel all… crawl-y. I don’t know, it’s stupid. But you’ve already done so much for me, and I feel like I’m taking advantage of you, and well… in Jakku when people are nice to you there are only so many reasons why, and none of them are ever good, and I’m not saying that applies to you or that you want anything from me but… I just don’t understand.”_

_She keeps her eyes stubbornly fixed on the Falcon even as Ben grows unnaturally still next to her._

_“Rey, look at me.”_

_“I’d rather not, thanks,” she mutters, busying herself by pretending to check the oil dipstick as if she hadn’t personally refilled all of the fluids just half an hour ago._

_“Hey,” Ben settles a hesitant, shaking hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. Just… look at me, please. I’m about to tell you some really important stuff.”_

_He gently steers her away from the engine, pops the hood back into place and leans against the car. “You’re literally the one good thing in my life right now, did you know that?” Ben says without preamble, and her eyes flit to his of their own accord._

_“Ben…”_

_“I mean it, Rey. I haven’t spoken to my family in a year, I have no friends in college. Snoke is the only person I talk to regularly outside of school, as disturbing as that is,” he acknowledges, his features twisting into a mask of disgust for all of two seconds. She can’t blame him; everything he’s told her about the man who’d scouted him and offered him the scholarship sounds shady as hell._

_“So yeah, you’re the one good thing left,” Ben shrugs. “And you have no idea how important that is to me, how much you do for my sanity. The motel, the laptop, those prep lessons – it’s all just_ stuff _, Rey. Stuff you can buy, because that’s all I have to offer you. What you give me… there’s no price you can pay for that. I could spend the rest of my life throwing stuff at you and still not make up for what you’ve given me.”_

_It’s the longest she’s ever heard him speak, the most heart-wrenchingly earnest thing he’s ever told her._

_Rey blinks away her tears and comes to a sudden realization. “I think you’re my best friend,” she croaks, barrels into Ben’s arms and holds him close._

_“I’m your_ only _friend,” he laughs as his hands wrap around her waist. “You’re my best friend too, sweetheart,” Ben adds quietly, his lips warm as they brush her forehead._

_So Ben keeps her safe and sheltered by paying for her room, and she keeps him sane by always being just a phone call away. They agree to call it even, and their friendship grows all the stronger for it._

* * *

She barely pays attention to the opera, and of course Ben notices.

After, they drive up to a nearby hill where the night sky is almost as clear as it is in Jakku and lean against the hood of his car like they used to.

It’s no Falcon (he drove it back to Chandrila one day when he knew his father wouldn’t be around and left the keys in the mailbox), but the Silencer is a nice car in its own way, sturdy enough that Rey doesn’t have to worry about a rusty hood caving under their combined weight.

“Is it your friends?” Ben asks once they’ve had their fill of stargazing.

Rey rests her head on his shoulder to avoid his eyes. “I told them maybe I should move out.”

He curls an arm around her waist. “What did they say?”

“Left before they could agree,” she shrugs, as if it’s a foregone conclusion that they would, as if the thought of allowing the rift between her and her friends to grow doesn’t reduce her to tears.

Ben draws her close, lets her hide her face in his neck and strokes her back silently as she cries.

“Am I really worth all this, Rey?” he whispers once she’s stopped shaking.

“Shut up,” she snaps, giving him a shove to get her ire across. The effect is somewhat undermined by a loud sniff on her part as she aggressively wipes away her tears, but Ben’s kind enough not to comment on that. “Of course you are, Ben. You’re the most important person in my life.”

He gives her one of those rare secret smiles of his, soft and fond and reserved only for her. “You’re the only important person in my life,” Ben whispers in return, looking at her as if she’s everything.

Sometimes Rey forgets that she’s known this man since she was fourteen, that when they were younger they used to pretend to be siblings so that innkeepers wouldn’t call the cops on them when they shared a room during road trips.

Because sometimes Ben says stuff like that, and looks at her _like that_ , and all she wants to do is kiss her best friend.

She shakes it off like she always does, smiles and goes back to leaning against him as they observe the city stretched out beneath them. “Your five years are almost up, right?”

“Just two more months to go,” Ben tells her, the relief in his voice palpable.

“Do you think you’ll leave Coruscant, once it’s all over?”

Ben shrugs, the motion of it jostling her just the slightest bit. “Maybe? I’ve been looking around, received a few offers so far. And really, anything would be better than staying at FO and working for Snoke any longer than I need to. But…”

“But?” she prompts, craning her neck to look up at him.

“But I don’t want to leave you behind again,” he admits. “This was the dream, remember? We were supposed to start a new life in Coruscant. And now you’re finally here, but…”

Rey bites down on her lower lip, weighs her next words carefully before she speaks. There’s nothing binding her to Coruscant other than the people, really; it’s not like she’s particularly attached to the job she’d only taken so that she’d have an excuse to move here. “We could start a new life somewhere else.”

He pulls away to look her in the eye, braces her with one hand wrapped around her arm. “Together?”

“Together,” Rey agrees, ignoring the shrill protests in the back of her mind warning her against running away from her problems.

Ben considers her for the longest time, finally shakes his head with a heavy sigh. “I can’t ask that of you, sweetheart. I _won_ ’t. You shouldn’t have to pick between me and your friends.”

“You don’t have to ask me,” she tells him. “I’m saying the choice is already made. They’re probably never going to talk to me again, anyway.”

“Rey,” Ben curls his fingers around her arm, a reassuring weight. “You don’t actually believe that. And you don’t actually want to leave them.”

She takes a deep breath, lets all of her bravado drain away with the exhale, and finally admits defeat. “I don’t know what else to do, Ben. I don’t want to lose them, but I _know_ I can’t lose you. That’s not even an option for me.”

God, she probably looks like a scared, lost child right now, imploring him for help with big, glassy eyes and the threat of more tears.

“Okay, this is ridiculous,” Ben mutters suddenly, pushing himself off the hood before he offers her a hand to pull her upright. “We’re solving this right now.”

“What? How?” she asks as Ben ushers her back into the car.

“Don’t worry about that, sweetheart,” he says, closing the door for her before he jogs around to his side of the car. “I’ll handle it.”

“Ben…”

She can’t help the note of wariness that bleeds into her voice; Ben doesn’t exactly have a way with people, after all. He’s been like that ever since they were young; Kylo Ren just takes that to a whole new level.

He turns, reaches for her hand across the console and brushes a kiss along her knuckles. Rey can’t even pinpoint when that started, just knows they’ve been doing it for years and now the gesture instantly sets her at ease. “Trust me, Rey.”

“Always,” she assures him easily, automatically.

 

* * *

 

_The summer before she’s due to start college, Ben apologizes to her about a hundred times for having to delay their road trip._

_“It’s fucking Snoke,” he growls over the phone, and she can picture him pacing around like a caged animal, all restless energy and poorly-contained frustration, one hand fisted in his hair. “Since it’s my last summer before graduation, he’s suddenly decided that I_ have _to do a test-run internship before I start working for him next year.”_

_“Ben, don’t worry about it, I understand–”_

_“One month at most, I promise. Then I’m coming to get you even if it pisses him off so much he cancels the scholarship. He can go shove that–”_

_“Benjamin Solo!” she snaps, knowing the reproach is more comical than anything, coming from her. But it does the trick: Ben calms down, takes a deep breath._

_“I miss you,” he whispers, and the ridiculous, stupid, hopeless,_ so fucking stupid _crush Rey’s been nursing for the last year threatens to suffocate her._

_“I miss you too,” she replies, and makes an excuse to hang up soon after so that she won’t have the chance to say anything too revealing._

_The crush has been… inconvenient, to say the least. It sparked into existence last summer, completely out of the blue. One day they were just Rey and Ben, fake siblings sharing a crappy motel room and jokingly shoving each other to the ground in order to claim the bed, and the next she was shy and flustered Rey and he was ‘oh shit, when did he Longbottom?’ Ben, and she’s been miserable ever since._

_Because pre-crush, she’d never noticed just how… sappy and touchy-feely they are with each other. Maybe if they were the same age, maybe if she’d been older when they first met…_

_But it is what it is, and none of that matters now. So Ben’s not going to be here for another month. Good. Great. She’s going to get this stupid crush under control, and they’re going to have the best summer road trip ever_ as friends _, and then maybe she’ll meet someone in college and project all of her stupid feelings onto that person instead so that she doesn’t run the risk of ruining the only good thing she’s ever had._

_It’s a good plan._

_Sadly, it does not work. Rey blushes more that summer than she has her entire life, and when Ben finally points them in the direction of Chandrila, she finds she can’t muster even the slightest bit of excitement for college, not when it means parting ways with him for the next few months._

_He’d sworn never to set foot in his home state again, but scholarships have led Rey to the University of Chandrila and so Ben dutifully drives her right into the very heart of Hanna City. The sane, composed person living in her mind understands that this is what best friends do for each other. The idiot teenager who’s taken up residence in her heart about four years too late wonders if he would do this for anyone else, if maybe this goes beyond the scope of best-friendship._

_She’s unusually silent for the last stretch of the trip, and Ben mistakes her sudden shift in mood for a bad case of nerves._

_“Everything’s going to be okay,” he assures Rey as the car idles across the street from the main entrance, neither of them willing to say goodbye just yet. “You’ll do great, Rey. You’re going to love it here, and you’ll make so many friends, just you wait–”_

_“You’ll always be my best friend, though,” she says suddenly, almost desperately as she turns to clutch at Ben’s sleeve. “You know that, right? Always, Ben.”_

_He knows her too well. “Hey,” Ben says softly, awkwardly leans over the console to hug her. “Of course. And you’ll always be my best friend too, Rey. Nothing will change that, okay? We’ll still meet up every chance we get, and I’ll always be there for you.”_

_“Promise?” Rey mumbles against his neck, and wonders if this is how children behave when they first leave home for a sleepover or camp or a trip, if maybe that’s what this sudden fear and sadness is all about. She’s never been anywhere outside of Jakku without Ben, doesn’t even know if she’s capable of navigating social situations without him around._

_Ben presses a kiss to her temple. “Every single break,” he vows. “Just… do me a favor and take the train to Takodana, okay? I’d rather not push my luck by returning here every few months.”_

_“Deal,” Rey says easily, allowing Ben to coax a laugh out of her._

_It takes another twenty minutes, a few more promises, and a lot of tearful hugging, but eventually she and Ben get out of the car, he unloads her measly two bags from the trunk of the Falcon, and off she goes into the next chapter of her life._

_Ben never returns to Chandrila throughout her time there, but that’s okay. Takodana is just an hour away and it’s beautiful and it’s_ theirs.

* * *

The day Rey knows Ben is supposed to meet Finn and Rose, she arranges to be out of the house until late at night, when everyone’s almost certainly gone to bed. She trusts Ben, of course she does, but some things just can’t be fixed. If this is one of those things, she’d rather not know just yet.

She slips into the house silent as a cat burglar, pads on her tiptoes, navigates the place in total darkness by memory alone, even remembers to avoid that one spot on the fourth step that always gives everyone away-

-only to find Finn and Rose waiting for her in Rose’s room right across from hers, the door wide open.

“Hi,” Rose says quietly, offers her a small wave and an uncertain smile.

Finn pats the spot between them. “C’mere, Peanut. We’ve got some apologizing to do.”

She finds herself rooted to the spot, incapacitated with relief. “It worked?”

“Yeah,” Finn shrugs. “We’re surprised too. But Ren- _Ben_ made a pretty convincing argument: we’re all in this for the long haul, Rey. None of us want to leave your life. So from now on, we’re just going to wear one big, invisible get-along shirt and never, ever put you through that again, okay?”

“Okay,” Rey sobs, and then promptly runs into her friends’ arms. “I missed you guys so much,” she admits, the three of them entangled in a group hug.

“We missed you too,” Rose says, her voice thick with tears. “I’m sorry we were such idiots. Even if he _is_ an awful person, that’s got nothing to do with you and your friends are yours to choose, Rey. We had no right to make you pick sides. We’ll never do that to you again.”

Finn shakes his head at Rose, turns to Rey with a knowing grin. “She’s just saying that because she knows if it ever came to that, you’d pick him in a heartbeat.”

“What?” Rey protests weakly, knowing that it’s nothing but the truth. “No I wouldn’t, you guys are–”

“Rey, it’s fine,” Finn assures her as they finally pull away from the group hug and arrange themselves against Rose’s headboard. “I didn’t understand it before, and we _did_ kinda worry that maybe you were a little too invested in him, but forget all of that. The man is a goner. He’s head over heels, will-walk-through-a-wall-of-fire gone.”

She struggles to wrap her mind around what Finn is implying until she remembers the good-natured teasing they like to subject her to. “What? _Guys_ , not this again. I told you, Ben and I are just–”

“No, Rey.” Rose gently takes her hand, looks her directly in the eye, and says, “He’s in love with you.”

Rey forces herself to laugh. “Really, you guys have it all wrong. We just care for each other a lot, that’s all–”

Finn sighs. “Rey, he told us so himself.”

She freezes.

“Well, I mean, not exactly,” Rose clarifies. “But we confronted him, and he pretty much admitted to it. Plus it’s _so obvious_ anyway. I’m still not a big fan of the guy, but it’s kinda cute, actually–”

Rose’s hand is still clasped with hers; Rey squeezes her fingers urgently. “Ben’s in love with me?” she asks, her voice barely a whisper, as if years of wishing in secret have rendered her incapable of speaking the words out loud.

“Oh, Rey,” Finn shakes his head with a laugh. “Please don’t take this the wrong way but… Peanut, sometimes you can be the dumbest person on Earth. You and Ben both.”

She processes the news for a bit longer, waits until her ears have stopped ringing. And then she borrows Finn’s car.

.  
.  
.

By the time she rings Ben’s doorbell, it’s close to one in the morning.

He answers the door in nothing but a pair of boxers, and she’s so flustered she finds herself blurting out, “Finn and Rose think you’re in love with me.”

Ben tugs her into his apartment with a hand curled around her wrist and shuts the door behind them. “I _knew_ they’d say something,” he sighs.

Rey’s world is falling apart at the seams because… well, because the fact is that she never did get over that stupid crush, and Ben’s really only grown more attractive since, and of course she loves him, has always loved him the way you love the one person in your life who’s always been there for you, the only person who can make you feel safe and at home. Finding out that all of this is reciprocated is a little too much for her brain to handle right now. “What the hell, Ben? It’s true?”

Ben has never, ever made her feel stupid, not even when she confessed to only being half-literate. But the look he gives her right now comes pretty close.

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” she asks quietly.

“ _Because_ ,” Ben huffs, turning his back on her as he stalks into the kitchen. “You’re my best friend and I don’t ever want to lose you and fuck, Rey, I’ve known you since you were a _kid_ ,” he reminds the both of them as she watches him grab a glass from the dishrack and fill it with water. “I mean, obviously I didn’t want you like _that_ back then, but at some point that changed for me but not for you, and I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable, I know you don’t see me that way–”

He holds out the glass of water, but Rey is too busy gaping at him to accept it. “Jesus fucking Christ, Ben,” she blurts out in exasperation. “You were basically the cause of my sexual awakening and you think I don’t see you that way?”

The silence that follows is deafening. Rey pries the glass from a catatonic Ben, nervously drains the whole thing as she braces herself for the fallout.

“I _what_?” Ben finally sputters.

Rey shrugs.

Ben steps closer, all wide eyes and nervous, bobbing Adam’s apple and quiet wonder. “Rey, did you just say–”

“Hey, didn’t you just admit to being in love with me?” Rey asks brightly, too brightly. “That’s a huge deal, right? Way bigger than–”

“How long?” Ben asks calmly, leaving barely an inch of space between them.

“Love is a big deal, Ben. And being _in_ love, I mean, that’s the biggest deal there is–” she babbles.

“Rey,” he says quietly, amusement gleaming in his eyes as he catches on to her nerves, her attempts at evasion. “How. Long?” His lips are curved into an unmistakable smirk, the kind that makes her toes curl.

“Does it even matter?” Rey asks weakly, bracing one hand against his chest to keep Ben from crowding her. “You love me, I love you, let’s just focus on that instead–”

Ben finally gets with the program. “You love me?” he marvels quietly, all earlier traces of confidence wiped away by the tentative hope in his eyes, the awe in his voice.

Rey curves her free hand around his cheek, applies the slightest bit of pressure to guide him down. “Ben,” she sighs against his lips, “of course I love you.”

She’s been waiting her entire adult life for Ben to kiss her, and then some. He does not disappoint. Rey loops both hands around the back of his neck, tangles her hands in his hair the way she’s always wanted to, and in return Ben wraps his hands around her knees and hoists her up, guides her legs to wrap around him before he gently, gently presses her up against the nearest wall.

In between kisses, while she’s gasping for breath and he’s trailing a path down her neck, Ben says, “Don’t think you’re off the hook, I still want to know about that sexual awakening thing–”

“Ben,” Rey huffs, yanks his lips back up to hers. “Shut up and take me to bed.”

And so he does, because for all his faults, Ben’s really the best friend a girl could ever ask for.

(He’s also, as Rey will soon discover, the best boyfriend a girl could ever ask for.)

**Author's Note:**

> If you made it through all 7k words of this, you are made of tougher stuff than I am.
> 
> This fic is needlessly long and meandering, because it reflects the needlessly long and meandering path I often have Rey and Ben take to get together. (Okay, fine, not really. I'm just ridiculously verbose and so bad at pacing, I apologize for subjecting you guys to this.)
> 
> Anyway, hopefully this served the purpose of getting me back into the swing of things and the next few fics I write for AU Week will be easier to get through. As always, thank you for reading, please don't hesitate to leave a comment, and-
> 
> Oh! If, for whatever reason, you'd actually like _more_ of this fic, here's [the missing scene where Ben meets Finn and Rose](https://eleanor-writes-stuff.tumblr.com/post/177210971220/hes-good-and-hes-bad-and-hes-all-that-ive-got), and here's [a very tiny deleted flashback](https://eleanor-writes-stuff.tumblr.com/post/177200964065/hes-good-and-hes-bad-and-hes-all-that-ive-got).


End file.
